I’m basically off of them. For most of my life, I thought about games daily. From their cultural impact to the gazillion questions spawned by game development. Not anymore. It’s a big personal shift.
Today I see a “Press R2” or “Press triangle for strong attack” or “Press up arrow for potions” in a YouTube video or in front of me and I feel like heading out to touch grass.
I see a “4/18” orb counter and I’m sick. Another skill tree, some crafting? Fuck my life. Opening crates sure, it’s not like I haven’t done that 48 trillion times since 2000.
War, tentacles, gore and cute overload. OK. I am so bored as hell. Sound design stays the same as it was 15-20 years ago. Slashing bodies doesn’t need to make a different noise, fair enough.
Another abandoned city because game development still can’t do fully alive cities well. So instead of inventing a completely different world without buildings, let’s just make one that used to be alive. But! Something something happened. So unheard of and edgy!
The me-too paradigm exhausts me. The second a game is popular, 300 copycats show up within a year. The second exhausting thing is “let’s combine two very popular things” and we end up with Call of Duty meets Stardew Valley where you can raise zombies and nuke your friend’s garden. It’s just weak brainstorms.
LOL but also what are we doing?
Looking at game culture from the side now, it’s wild how hidden it is. Very few people talk about playing games. Very few play in public! Games are huge and don’t exist at all, simultaneously. Or when the culture does exist in the news, it’s about groomer streamers and silly games like that checkbox one. Ugh.
This is after 40+ years of game culture. A joke! Yeah. I don’t know man.
Games don’t teach much if anything if we want to be honest. They are making folks busy for hundreds of hours for no other benefit than humming that menu melody for the rest of their lives. I’m less and less OK with that.
Gamification has ruined so many things. Another tool for coercion, distraction and control as the article says.
Meanwhile inside the industry, layoffs, acquisitions and mergers bring pain x100 left and right. Another small team of folks who worked at that big studio for 20 years and believes that their ideas and a $1M VC check are enough to sustain themselves (narrator: probably 100% not).
And of course, video games are still mostly about sequels ad nauseam. I think another Tomb Raider is in the work? What the fuck.
Watching Wukong or Star Wars Outlaws, the latest big releases which are not sequels, I’m amazed at the amount of work. The incremental progress on everything (lighting is clearly near perfect today), fluid dynamics getting there, the accumulated knowledge at Ubi (25 years of open world system design), or Unreal 5 in its full glory, it shows and it’s impressive. At the same time it all feels so predictable, pointless, corny (listen to games without watching them and you’ll understand) and unnecessary to spend a hundred bucks to check waypoints, do pew-pew behind a wall and open crates as if –again– we hadn’t done that for decades already.
Having said all that, I could play some Counter-Strike with homies and talk shit all evening right now. It would be fun. I don’t know when I’ll be able to gather 10 folks with similar CS skills around a table or two.
Maybe never. Perhaps that’s a good thing.